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Race And Immigration, Then And Now: How The Shift To "Worthiness" Undermines The 1965 Immigration Law's Civil Rights Goals, Elizabeth Keyes
Race And Immigration, Then And Now: How The Shift To "Worthiness" Undermines The 1965 Immigration Law's Civil Rights Goals, Elizabeth Keyes
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This essay looks at how far immigration reform has come from the explicit civil rights character of the 1965 immigration law that reshaped America. The optimism surrounding that law’s dismantling of national-origins barriers to immigration proved to be overstated in the intervening decades, as the factors determining an immigrant’s “worth and qualifications” too often became proxies for race. After briefly looking at work done by critical race theorists tracing some of ways race and immigration have long intersected in immigration legal history, the article closely examines modern-day immigration reform proposals, particularly the Senate bill that remains the most complete articulation …
Beyond Saints And Sinners: Discretion And The Need For New Narratives In The U.S. Immigration System, Elizabeth Keyes
Beyond Saints And Sinners: Discretion And The Need For New Narratives In The U.S. Immigration System, Elizabeth Keyes
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Beyond Saints and Sinners examines the forces affecting the exercise of discretion in American immigration courts, and argues that in this present age of immigration anxiety, the same facts that place an individual in deportation proceedings may constitute the reasons a judge will, relying on discretion, deny them relief for which they are otherwise eligible. The article explores the polarized narratives told about "good" and "bad" immigrants, the exceptionally difficult task of adjudicating in overburdened immigration courts, and the ways in which these polarized narratives interact with psychological short-cuts, or heuristics, that affect judicial exercises of discretion. After engaging in …